2. Then there’s the subject of location. I live in Washington, DC. To some (e.g., Roosh) this is like the second or third cycle of hell above Satan when it comes to women.

So, one plus of DC is a surfeit of smart women vs. trailer-park trash that’s more and more common in my hometown. One negative, as others have mentioned, is a lack of sufficiently friendly, feminine, and DTF women.

I think I do better with foreign women, and DC has its fair share. Trouble is to find them. DC has its own culture, and some say that women are better in the south: e.g., Charleston, Charlotte, and Austin. Thoughts?

The well-documented experiences of Roissy, Roosh and a bunch of other DC-area game bloggers have gotten the capital region a reputation as one of the truly miserable sexual marketplaces in the United States, almost as notorious as New York City. I was curious if DC Phil was seriously considering changing locations for the purpose of improving his results with women:

As for location, are you considering a move based on the quality of women? I’ve lived all over this country and I’ve never lived in one place that made me say “this place is WAY better than the rest” when it came to women. The unfortunate fact is that American women have more or less the same basic problems all over the country. Thinking you can go from a hellhole to a harem with a plane ticket is sort of a defeatist attitude, playing the victim of your circumstances.

Don’t get me wrong – a change of scenery (via a cross-country move) was a huge factor in a quantum leap of happiness for me. You need to find a place that is good because it’s where YOU like to be, not because the female crop is marginally better.

If you dig foreign women and international culture, DC is better than most places. Unless you’re really miserable or are considering expatriating, I wouldn’t spend too much effort worrying about the SMPs in other cities.

As the days go by I concur with my own comment even more. Over the course of my life I’ve lived in six different cities, and moved coast to coast three times since graduating high school. I’ve had good and bad experiences everywhere, but I haven’t found a Holy Grail/fountain of youth of game anywhere. The American SMP is what it is, and changing cities is really just working the margin. (Caveat: I have never lived in the South, where I am told the intergender relations are a lot rosier.)

Changing your city for the purpose of gaming the sexual marketplace violates Roissy’s maxim of making your mission, not your woman, your priority. Sure you have to go where the women are (a good reason not to live in a place like Silicon Valley), but if you change your whole life around for that purpose you’ve invested your own fortunes in the hands of that region’s women writ large.

GO TO THE PLACE WITH THE BEST YOU, NOT THE BEST WOMEN

HOWEVER, that’s not to say that changing cities won’t improve your results. But it has a lot less to do with the SMP itself and a lot more to do with maximizing your personal excellence.

I was a pole vaulter in high school (a ridiculously fun sport, by the way). Some pole vaulters were convinced that cold weather hurt their performance because the fiberglass material was stiffer in lower temperatures. My coach put the lie to that. “The poles work essentially the same over a 20-degree temperature span. What doesn’t perform as well in the cold is not the pole, it’s the athlete – you run slower, your muscles aren’t as limber and it’s more difficult to stay warmed up during a meet.”

My own personal example bears this out. Following my early departure from graduate school, I took a job that caused me to move across the country yet again. It was well worth it, giving me some disposable income and a sense that I was really living an “adult” life along with the chance to start my social life over again, leaving behind my old habits and “passive friends” (the people you spend your time with who are just around, but not really contributing to your life). I jumped into the new place, making new friend groups, hitting online dating hard and getting out of the office with my new coworkers. Soon I was right at home, a feeling of comfort and well-being that took my game to greater heights than ever before.

If you are considering a move – for a job, because you’re tired of where you live, whatever – go to the place where you are going to have the best life. It’s more than the money; hunt hard for the opportunity to work in a field you enjoy, good work-life balance, a spread of activities you want to participate in, weather you enjoy, a city that fits your personality. Then you will be confident, competent, accomplished and friendly, able to build a social circle and a toolbox of charisma. That’s far better for your own quality of life than moving somewhere you may not be keen on because someone told you the women are hotter or easier or whatever.

Apropos of little else in this post, I advocate that young people should seek to move to a new city before they put down permanent roots, most preferably after graduation – even if it’s just the next city a few hours’ drive away. You’ll never have the freedom to move that you have right after college, when you own very little and have little personal or professional investment in a city, and that is opportunity cost you can never get back. Go have an adventure before life happens to you.

GO WHERE THE WOMEN YOU WANT ARE

Further discussion moved into how to find the international flavor of gal that DC Phil is looking for. Somebody chimed in with the sage saying “we find what we are looking for,” to which I responded:

This is a piece of wisdom I’ve really been working lately. There’s an aphorism about dating that says “think of the places your ideal mate would spend their time. Then – go there!” Like if I really want to bag the really athletic woman I’ve been dreaming about since high school, I better start spending a lot more time on the bike trail, hiking, in the gym and in high-performance adult sports leagues. If the intellectual chick is your quarry, hit up historical societies, erudite coffee shops, hip bookstores, cosplay events, you get the idea. Then it becomes part of your lifestyle, and you’re not doing it to get women – but the women land at your feet. (Hopefully.)

Don’t buy the “you won’t meet a good woman in a bar” trope, but when you’re in a “typical” single-mingle environment, the jockettes and nerdettes who are there aren’t playing that script, they’re playing the “pick me up by wowing me with your game” script, and they’re mixed in with a lot of other chaff.

There’s an element of game training that is something of a head fake. There’s no way to sharpen your game without practicing – going out and doing lots of approaches, taking a lot of risks and failing a lot. But through all that, some degree of a man’s success is not going to be due to improvement in his game; it will simply be the fact that he’s motivated to present himself to women. Odds are he’s going to find someone who likes him. When he combines the effort of approaching with some real strategy and bakes it for 6-12 months, his results will go up considerably.

I’ve lived in London, Liverpool and various small towns in the south of England and these environments all had their own merits and demerits.

London would be the best for women but who can afford to live there? Who wants to live in a shoe box? Who wants all that overcrowding, pollution and noise?

Liverpool has a much lower cost of living, better air quality, good public transport, no overcrowding, friendly unpretentious locals and noise isn’t a problem.

I’m not wildly keen on the fashion sense of the local women, but you can’t have everything.

As for the small towns in the south of England, they suck donkey balls from every angle.

@Ryu: Its not pump-and-dumps that create unattractive women with shitty attitudes.

Perverse economic incentives, counter-productive political policies and the growth of technologies that pander to personal vanity (e.g. smartphones) have a big role to play in creating both female monsters and the male simps who pander to them.

Let’s not forget fast food and sedentary lifestyles. These play the largest role in corroding the physical health and attractiveness of both sexes.

I disagree entirely. First, he number of effective PUAs even in a large city is going to be in the dozens. Plenty of guys bought Neil Strauss and Roosh’s books and spit a few lines. The guys who really followed through to become effective players (adding to the extant market of natural players) is a very small number. Even if each of them bags 50 women, the number of women sleeping with PUAs is going to be on the order of hundreds or low thousands. And believe it or not, women are having a good amount of sex with guys we wouldn’t define as players.

Secondly, a pump-and-dump only creates a bitter, nasty woman if she’s being deceived about what’s going on (which the major game gurus don’t teach), or if she’s engaging in so much casual sex that it cores out her soul (I find casual sex a dangerous pandora’s box to open, but I think most women can handle one or two casual experiences without it completely destroying their mindset). Even the term “pump and dump” is a bit of a misnomer, in that there’s nothing to “dump” in a casual sex relationship, you just stop sleeping with the person or refuse to progress to a relationship.

I see it more as the type of women who engage in regular recreational sex are already mentally off, either cynically jaded or with a clueless party mindset. Those are the places PUAs gravitate to, respond to what the market provides. Dalrock once wondered if sluttitude was evidence of a bonding-averse psychology rather than creating it. I think he had a very good point.

Now we do know that the rationalization hamster likes to run free, so a good number of women are no doubt talking themselves into thinking that the guy she banged on the first night is going to turn into a committed boyfriend, and through confirmation bias taking everything he says and does as evidence that he wants to make her his one and only.

Small towns are a big problem just for the numbers. Fortunately stateside we have a lot of sizeable cities so you can pick hot/cold, hockey vs NASCAR, boating versus skiing and still wind up somewhere with enough women that you have a big enough pool to draw from.

I grew up in a town of less than 5000 people I had known all the girls, and they had all known me, since we were 5 years old. By the time I was 18 and leaving for college, we had all thoroughly vetted one another. Those who stayed pretty much married each other.

This was a huge reason for leaving — the women were all a known and finite quantity, the amount and quality of which were not going to change appreciably. And they have not, more than 20 years later.

Badger-
You know, if you REALLY want to test this out: February is JUST around the corner.

*chucks down gauntlet*

I’ve lived on both coasts and have NEVER lived further south than Charleston, Sc. I actually spent 3 month’s in DC and noticed a VERY palpable muck about the women there. I’ve LIVED in 3 countries where English was NOT the national language and I yeah, the women are MUCH better prospective future wives. When i went to London (twice btw), i did VERY well (b/c of my accent. Lol). I think it’s been pretty well established on most of the sites about American versus Foreign women.

“go where you’ll be a better you” is the absolute best frame. A better you will tyiipically cause women to gravitate to you. My “women are the side dish of my life and not the entree'” frame is where that stems from. I didn’t number close the stripper by WANTING to, I was myself and reacted to her IOI’s and it paid off. Again, she’s a side dish, sometimes….I barely touch my side dish. Of course it’s GOOD…..I’ll destroy the side dish. Lol.

Moving somewhere to have better dating prospects is just ludicrous. I’m retiring back in NO (instead of Texas) when I retire. WHY: it’ll be better for me opportunity wise, while Texas is TEAMING with oh-so yummy mexican lass goodness, NO is better for me in the long run.

The four times I’ve moved I’ve noticed huge growth in how I get treated by others and my ability for personal growth. As a man, if you continue to grow and mature, meeting new people I feel ups your game over continuing with old acquaintances.

Thats because of first impressions and being a ‘known quantity,’ which is bull. If you grow and change you want to see people treat you differently, but they don’t. To get that its far easier to put yourself in a new environment in an effort to find better acquaintances and chances for women. You’ll be new and exciting while getting to start with a clean slate.

It doesn’t have to be as drastic as moving though. Go to new bars, new coffee shops, new bookstores, do new sports and new activities. You’ll meet new people, have a new chance, and best of all you’ll lead a more rounded, fulfilling and interesting life. That last part will up your appeal while adding lasting value simply for yourself.

This is where i was getting at with my comment on TPM’s post. I’ve lived coast to coast in major metropolis, sizable cities and dinky small towns and the only place that “sucked” for meeting new women are small towns as few are single, and the ones who are, are single for a reason *cut to blue whale clips*
The one constant that always affected how i perceived a place was me. You make the most out of the place you are at, the place doesn’t make the most out of you.

It makes sense to experience a few places before settling for one spot. If only for the sake of whetting and paring down your sense of identity which is often distorted reflexively by those around you. I believe studying honest blogs like this one do also contribute to sharper self-awareness.

I moved away from the small town I grew up in to a university city. The increased variety of people made it much easier to set up social circles and grow personally. Whenever I return to my hometown during the holiday I realize it was , in part, the self-limiting beliefs that made it such a lonesome place. I wouldn’t live there again, but it is certainly not as barren ( of opportunity ) as I thought it was when I left. This could be ascribed to the fact that I have matured a bit and forsaken the astronomical hopes and disappointments constitutive of youth .

I lived in DC for 5 years and have mixed feelings. Compared to other places I’ve lived (Boston, SE NH (UNH girls are HOT), Russia, Philly…girls were definitely less attractive and bitchier on the whole. It’s the high concentration of lawyers and idealistic poli-sci/int’l relations majors (I studied the latter). Girls would come out the area schools believing they’re out to literally save the world (worth noting how job-friendly DC is for women as well).

BUT- it’s a big city and there are still lots of attractive women. If you don’t like DC, you could head over to Arlington…Clarendon had some of the hottest girls in the area and they were all of post-college age. Compared to where I am now though, in a small-town shithole in TX, I’d take the women from DC in a heartbeat.

“The four times I’ve moved I’ve noticed huge growth in how I get treated by others and my ability for personal growth. As a man, if you continue to grow and mature, meeting new people I feel ups your game over continuing with old acquaintances.”

Moving to a new place definitely “resets” or corrects your SMV to be accurate. The effect of the old guard being around you induces you to play into old, invalid frames. Flyfreshandyoung discussed this pernicious psychological effect as applied to gaming girls you couldn’t get back in the day.

New York City is notorious for dating because it has a steep female-to-male ratio imbalance, because the business climate is highly competitive (distilling a lot of douchebags out) and because so many people move there seeking the glamour of New York and so are driven by hypergamous impulses.